Monday, 29 August 2005

Thanks to Sean for flagging this one for me. Given what we already suspect about Lockerbie this comes as no suprise, see the end of the article for some other related stories.

A former Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.

The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.

The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.

The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi's attempt to have a retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.

The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland, is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent that his bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya.

Last night, George Esson, who was Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway when Megrahi was indicted for mass murder, confirmed he was aware of the development.

But Esson, who retired in 1994, questioned the officer's motives. He said: "Any police officer who believed they had knowledge of any element of fabrication in any criminal case would have a duty to act on that. Failure to do so would call into question their integrity, and I can't help but question their motive for raising the matter now."

Other important questions remain unanswered, such as how the officer learned of the alleged conspiracy and whether he was directly involved in the inquiry. But sources close to Megrahi's legal team believe they may have finally discovered the evidence that could demolish the case against him.

An insider told Scotland on Sunday that the retired officer approached them after Megrahi's appeal - before a bench of five Scottish judges - was dismissed in 2002.

The insider said: "He said he believed he had crucial information. A meeting was set up and he gave a statement that supported the long-standing rumours that the key piece of evidence, a fragment of circuit board from a timing device that implicated Libya, had been planted by US agents.

"Asked why he had not come forward before, he admitted he'd been wary of breaking ranks, afraid of being vilified.

Monday, 22 August 2005

The Sunday Herald and the Observer have new revelations about the de Menezes murder.

~

There has been speculation that all the recent terror incidents in London are part of a 'strategy of tension' similar to that which brought terror to Greece, Italy and Turkey in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

It looks as if there were (at least) two groups who were involved in the pursuit of de Menezes:

1. The police2. A shadowy military group

Senior sources in the Metropolitan Police have told The Observer (21 August 2005) that

1. their surveillance officers felt that de Menezes was not about to detonate a bomb,2. was not armed3. and was not acting suspiciously.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1553440,00.html

A police source said: 'There is no way those three guys would have been on the train carriage with him [de Menezes] if they believed he was carrying a bomb. Nothing he did gave the surveillance team the impression that he was carrying a device.'

It was only when they were joined by 'armed officers' that things changed.

The Sunday Herald, which often has the best sources on security matters, tells us about the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR).

http://www.sundayherald.com/51372

The Sunday Herald, 21 August 2005, tells us about the monitoring of the flat in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill, in south London.

The address was said to be linked to alleged bomber Hussein Osman.( Hussain Osman - arrested in Rome )

Among the surveillance team in Scotia Road was a soldier from a new “special forces” regiment -the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR).

James Cusick, in the Sunday Herald, writes:

"According to security sources, SRR personnel were involved in the tailing operation that saw de Menezes leave the block of flats, board a bus, and then enter the tube station at Stockwell. SRR personnel are also believed to have been on the tube train when he was shot.

"The SRR soldier at Scotia Road (given the codename Tango 10) used equipment which sent realtime pictures of all who came and went from the flats. Those receiving the pictures could check them against footage of who they were looking for. One security source said: 'In this kind of operation you never leave. You need to pee: you use a bottle; if there’s no bottle, tough. You never leave.'

"The police account says there is no footage of de Menezes leaving because the SRR soldier had to relieve himself. The police account says he sent out a message calling the man who left [de Menezes] an 'ICI' – a white northern European...

"Hussein Osman – arrested in Rome and scheduled for deportation to the UK within the next two months – was not an ICI. The CCTV footage of Osman the police held showed an Asian/north African male.

"De Menezes took a bus to Stockwell tube station, stopping briefly at Brixton...

"It is also understood that the senior police officer in charge of the operation, Commander Cressida Dick, had ordered de Menezes at this stage to be detained before he went into the tube station and that he should be alive...

"So why was de Menezes not stopped before the station?"

Both members of the police and the mysterious second group were on the train with de Menezes. Members of the mysterious second group murdered de Menezes.

"A security agency source contacted by the Sunday Herald said: 'This take-out is the signature of a special forces operation. It is not the way the police usually do things.... this has special forces written all over it.'”

The Sunday Herald points out:

"The initial post-mortem report into de Menezes’s death states the young Brazilian had 'vaulted over the ticket barrier'.

"A post-mortem report does not take its information from media reports. The police are contacted directly and written accounts are delivered. Details of the barrier being “vaulted” therefore came from the police. Why?

"And why at 4pm – five hours after the shooting – when the police would have known they had not killed Hussein Osman but a young Brazilian, did Sir Ian hold a press conference and insist that the shooting was 'directly linked' to the anti-terrorist operation?"

~~

What about the de menezes flat? Did Osman really live there?

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1553440,00.html

From the Observer, 21 August 2005:

"Questions have been raised about the accuracy of the police intelligence that led to the raid on the block of flats occupied by de Menezes. It was initially suggested that the flat was connected to the man known as Hussein Osman, who was arrested in Italy.

"On the Saturday after the shooting, officers raided the flat in a high-profile operation watched by the world's media. As a result, a man, identified only as 'C', was arrested 'on suspicion of the commission, instigation or preparation of acts of terrorism'. But he was released on 30 July with no charge, raising the possibility that the flats had no connection with the bombings."

~

Was there a plot to fool the public?

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/anthonylarkin.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4706787.stm

A passenger on the train, Anthony Larkin, told BBC News the man appeared to be wearing a "bomb belt with wires coming out".The 'man' was Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot by government agents.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4706913.stm

Commuter Anthony Larkin, who was also on the train at Stockwell station, told 5 Live he saw police chasing a man.

"I saw these police officers in uniform and out of uniform shouting 'get down, get down', and I saw this guy who appeared to have a bomb belt and wires coming out and people were panicking and I heard two shots being fired."

Anthony Larkin, the lead evidence recovery scientist with the Metropolitan Police...

~~

Did elements of the security services hope to fool the public into thinking that the person who was shot was one of the 'bombers' such as Hussain Osman - arrested in Rome .

Hussein Osman, who also uses the name Hamdi Isaac, moved to Rome by Eurostar five days after the 21 July attacks in London. His passport was not checked by the British at Waterloo.

~~

Operation Gladio and the 'strategy of tension' in Italy beginning in 1969.

Operation Gladio was organised by 'fascists' within the security services of the West.

Reportedly, the idea was to kill innocent people and then blame this on others.

Gladio was about keeping the right-wing elite in power.

Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony:

'You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force ... the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.'

Parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have given us a little of the truth.

The book "NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe," by Daniele Ganser documents some of what we know so far.

Run by fascist elements in NATO and Washington, right-wing militias carried out acts of terrorism and electoral subversion in states such as Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey and West Germany.

A Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, details the methods for launching terrorist attacks.85 people were killed on August 2, 1980 in the bombing of the Bologna train station.

According to the Italian Senate, after its investigation in 2000, the bombers were later discovered to be "men inside Italian state institutions and ... men linked to the structures of United States intelligence."

The Bologna bomb was part of Gladio's " strategy of tension" - fomenting fear to keep populations in thrall to "strong leaders" who will protect the nation from the ever-present terrorist threat.

The beginning of the 'strategy of tension' in Italy came in Dec. 12, 1969 when a bomb exploded inside the Banca Nazionale dell' Agricoltura in Milan's Piazza Fontana. 16 people were killed and 58 wounded.

Friday, 12 August 2005

In the years to come journalists will have to ask themselves how it was they allowed themselves to be so utterly lead. Their job is to question, not to stop questioning because they think it might give "aid and comfort" to an enemy they don't even know really exists. The whole thing is a fucking lie, just like the official LIES about the London Bombings.

Towers that fell ‘like a controlled demolition’. Planes that vanished then mysteriously reappeared, And crucial evidence that has been lost for ever. A new book raises bizarre yet deeply unsettling questions about the world’s worst terror atrocity…..

The plot by America’s military bosses was devilish in both design and intent - to fabricate an outrage against innocent civilians, fool the world and provide a pretext for war. In the pentagon, a top secret team drew up a plan to simultaneously send up two airliners painted and numbered exactly the same, one from a civil airport in America, the other from a secret military airbase nearby.

The one from the airport would have military personnel on board who had checked in as ordinary passengers under false names. The one from the airbase would be an empty drone, a remote-controlled unmanned aircraft.

Somewhere along their joint flight paths, the passenger-carrying plane would drop below radar height, and disappear, landing back at the airbase and unloading its occupants in secret.

Meanwhile, the drone would have taken up the other plane’s designated course. High over the island of Cuba, it would be exploded in mid-air after broadcasting an international distress call that it was under attack from enemy fighters.

The world would be told that a plane load of blameless American holidaymakers had been deliberately shot down by Fidel Castro’s Communists - and that the US had no choice but to declare war and topple his regime.

This ‘agent provocateur’ plan - code named OPERATION NORTHWOODS and revealed in official archives - dates from 1962 when the Cold War was at its height.

Four decades later, there are a growing number of people who look back at this proto-conspiracy and then to the events of 9/11 and see uncanny and frightening modern parallels.

For Cuba, read Iraq, say these skeptics. For the dummy airliner, read the Twin Towers in New York.

The Northwoods plan is crucial to the argument presented in a hugely provocative - many would say fantastical - yet, at times, genuinely disturbing new analysis of 9/11 by two radical British based journalists, Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan.

Did the CIA actively help the hijackers?

In it, they examine various conspiracy theories that suggest the Bush administration connived in the devastating aerial attacks on New York and Washington four years ago.

The reason? To give Bush the excuse he wanted to push ahead with his secret, long-held plane to invade Iraq and capture its oilfields.

As we shall see. Many of the theories they raise are outlandish in the extreme. It would be easy to dismiss them as hokum, the invention of over-active imaginations among those whose instinct is always to find some way to blame America for the world’s ills.

Are we really supposed to believe that the CIA actively helped the hijackers succeed - or even that the US government staged the whole attack and itself murdered thousands of its own citizens?

Some would say that even in discussing suck notions, we are lending comfort to terrorists and doing a disservice to the dead.

However, much of evidence the authors present is undeniably compelling - and their arguments sound rather less preposterous in the light of OPERATION NORTHWOODS all those years ago. That plan was proposed in all seriousness by America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff in a memo to the Secretary of Defence. It got as far as the Attorney General - Robert Kennedy, brother of the president, John Kennedy, before being vetoed.

It is proof, says Henshall and Morgan, that forces at the top of the US Government are capable of conceiving a deadly, devious and fraudulent plan to further their own secret ends - even under such a supposedly ‘nice guy’ president as JFK.

In which case, can the idea of a 9/11 plot by those who serve the deeply mistrusted Bush really be ruled out with total certainty, without at least considering the arguments?

Of course, the official explanation for 9/11 is that Al Qaeda just got lucky that sunny morning in September 2001.

The terrorists conducted their attacks without outside help, by this account, and intelligence and other blunders by the US authorities that contributed to their terrible success - for example, ignored warnings that an attack involving aeroplanes was likely, or issuing US entry visas to 19 Islamic fanatics set on murder - were just that: blunders.

This is the White House’s version and it was endorsed by a Washington commission of inquiry under Thomas Kean published last year.

But, according to Henshall and Morgan, the story is full of gaping holes and unanswered questions. And the most startling question, which remains unresolved, they say, is why the hijackers’ principal target, the two 110-storey towers at the World Trade Centre in New York crumbled so easily.

No-one who watched each building suddenly cascade into dust and debris in just 20 seconds will ever forget the slow-motion horror. But now the question is asked: was it all too pat, too neat?

Though 30 years old, the towers had expressly been built to survive the impact of a Boeing 707, a plane the same size and carrying as much fuel as the ones that struck. That they collapsed after being hit and fell at such speed was unprecedented in the history of architecture. It astonished many engineers.

The official explanation is known as the Pancake Effect - steel supports melting in the intense fireball, causing the floors to tumble down on each other.

The problem here is that the heat from the explosions was probably not nearly as great as people tend to assume.

There was indeed a lot of kerosene from the aircraft fuel tanks when flight 11 from Boston hit the North Tower between the 94th and the 98th floors but pictures show that most of this fireballed outwards. Experts have questioned whether the fire ever got hot enough to melt the buildings’ steel frames.

Oddly, too, original estimates by firefighters after the second plane, Flight 175, hit the South Tower, were that the blaze was containable.

Two firefighters actually reached the crash zone on the 78th floor and a tape exists of them radioing down that just two hoses would be enough to get the fire under control - in which ca\se the situation should have been little different from a ‘normal’ office fire, and no steel tower ever collapsed as the result of such a blaze.‘The fire wasn’t hot enough to cause a collapse’

Kevin R Ryan, laboratory director at a US underwriting firm specializing in product safety, was sacked from his job last year after questioning the official explanation.

“The buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by the burning jet fuel”, he said. “If steel did soften or melt, this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans.”

Intriguingly, Ryan claimed that his firm had checked and approved the steel used in the towers when they were built. This was later vehemently denied by the bosses who sacked him.

To add to the mystery, the tape of the two firemen was kept secret and when relatives were finally allowed to listen to it, they had to sign strict confidentiality agreements.

If the Pancake Effect theory is wrong, there’s one obvious alternative: that the towers were brought down by the sheer impact of the planes hitting them. But this, according to the skeptics, ignores basic physics.

The initial hit on the North Tower, for example, destroyed 33 of the 59 columns in its north face. This meant the damage was asymmetrical, so any resulting collapse would surely have been lopsided.

In fact, the building fell evenly. The TV aerial on the summit sank vertically, in a straight line.

There were other strange anomalies. According to the Kean Commission, when the first plane struck: ‘A jet fuel fireball erupted and shot down a bank of elevators, bursting into numerous lower floors, including the lobby level, and the basement four storeys below ground.’

Unlikely, say Henshall and Morgan. A firm by a French documentary crew, who by chance were following a New York firefighting team that day, shows the first men arriving. The lobby was covered in fine debris and the windows were shattered but there was none of the soot or oily residue that burning jet fuel would have left behind.

Meanwhile down in the basement, a 50-ton hydraulic press was reduced to rubble and a steel and concrete fire door demolished. Witnesses there said the destruction was less like that from a fireball flash and more like that from a bomb.

Some firefighters told reporters that day that they thought there had been bombs in the building - before apparently being silenced by their chiefs. So had Al Qaeda cleverly placed explosives inside the rowers as well as attacking them from the air?

Or, as conspiracy theorists would have it, had some homegrown agency mined the towers to make sure they fell - but neatly without collapsing over the rest of Manhattan, America’s financial and business heartland?

The authors quote an expert demolition contractor from Pennsylvania, Michael Taylor, who said the fall of the buildings ‘looked like a controlled demolition’.

Another expert, Van Romero, vice-president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, reached the same opinion after studying videos of the disaster, and concluded that ‘explosive devices inside the buildings’ caused them to collapse.

Strangely and without explanation, he recanted that view just ten days after going public with it. Might he possibly have been leaned on?

Even stranger, say Henshall and Morgan, was the collapse of a third building on the World Trade Centre site, a smaller 47-storey block known as WTC7, which was largely ignored by the world’s media.

It had not been hit by a plane yet it, too, mysteriously fell many hours after the Towers had gone.

The official explanation for this was that fuel stores caught fire as a result of debris from the burning towers, the building began to bulge in one corner, and after that it was unsalvageable.

But remember that, according to Henshall and Morgan, a steel-framed building had never collapsed as a result of a fire before this day. And, again according to the authors, WTC7 appears almost untouched by fire in photographs taken at the time.

The landlord of the World Trade Centre site, Larry Silverstein, explicitly suggested at one point that WTC7 was deliberately demolished. He told a US TV documentary that a decision was taken to ‘pull’ the building rather than risk loss of life, though this was later denied.

Certainly, according to Henshall and Morgan, the building’s fall in seven seconds was just as textbook-tidy and suspicious as the collapse of the Twin Towers. Given that it also housed offices of the US Secret Service, the CIA and the Defence Department, this has led conspiracy theorists to give it a key role in the supposed 9/11 plot - as we will see shortly.

Part of the whole problem, according to Henshall and Morgan, is that vital evidence about what happened was destroyed or muddied in the wake of the atrocity.One expert said there were bombs inside the towers

Ground Zero, the base of the towers, was fiercely protected by the authorities - understandably so because it not only contained human remains but a cache of seized drugs held in an FBI office and more than $1 billion of gold from bank vaults in the Buildings.

Yet what went on behind all the heavy security?

After most air disasters, the wreckage of the planes is meticulously gathered up and pieced together in search of clues.

Extraordinarily, in the course of removing the rubble from the Twin Towers to a nearby landfill site, the 9/11 salvage operation seems to have ‘lost’ four six-ton aircraft engines, besides failing to find the ‘black box’ flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders from either of the planes.

These data boxes - which could have revealed exactly what happened in the doomed jets - are deliberately designed to withstand heavy impacts and exceptionally high temperatures. It is, according to experts, very rare for them not to be recovered after an accident.

Unfortunately, according Henshall and Morgan, there was a singular lack of official zeal even to establish the very basic fact that the aircraft that hit the Twin Towers were the same as those that took off from Boston.

Perhaps, with almost the entire world watching the attacks on TV, it hardly seemed necessary to prove the glaringly obvious. But this failure to follow standard procedures for accident investigation once again gave encouragement to the conspiracy theorists.

And then there was the oddity of the single passport. The black boxes may have been destroyed and steel girders melted - yet somehow one of the hijackers’ passports avoided this inferno and was found intact in a nearby street by ‘a passer-by’.

To Henshall and Morgan, that seems absurd, as does the almost instant identification of this person as a hijacker rather than a passenger or a Twin Towers office worker. Conspiracy theorists suspect the passport was planted to help establish the official story in the first, critical hours after the disaster.Why didn't fighter planes intercept the hijackers?

Still more unanswered questions surround what happened at the Pentagon in Washington, in the third successful terrorist attack that day.

After taking off from Dulles Airport, Washington, American Airlines Flight 77 dropped off the radar screens for 36 minutes when its transponders sending signals back to air traffic control were switched off.

When the blip reappeared, it was closing on the city but where precisely the aircraft had been for the past half an hour was a mystery. Nor could anyone in air traffic control figure out what it was.

Experienced officials apparently watched its speed and maneuverability and thought it must be a military plane. Conspiracy theorists maintain this is precisely what it was.

In a repeat of New York, no evidence has ever been produced from the wreckage to prove that it was Flight 77 that hurtled into the side of the Pentagon at 350mph.

Photographs show that the hole it made was large enough for the fuselage of a Boeing 757 but not for the wings and the tail, though these supposedly disappeared through the gap and then vapourised.

For the conspiracy theorists, this points to a conclusion that what hit was not Flight 77, and not even a jetliner.

Some witnesses claim the plane they say hit the Pentagon was a small one, an eight - or 12-seater, and that it did not have the roar of an airliner but the shrill whine of a fighter plane, One witness is convinced it was a missile.

The authors say the matter could be cleared up by CCTV footage of the crash from a nearby filling station, a hotel and traffic surveillance cameras. Unfortunately, the FBI seized all three videos within minutes of the crash and they have never been released.The hole in the Pentagon was too small for a Boeing

If they were produced, they might lay to rest the theory that what hit the Pentagon was a military drone painted in airline livery and that just before impact it fired a missile to enable a clean entry which would explain the lack of debris. But until they are, the skeptics will continue to have a field day.

In essence, to the extreme conspiracy theorists, what took place on 9/11 was a repeat of the aborted OPERATION NORTHWOODS.

Far from being an attack by Islamic terrorists, they say, the events were a complete hoax, a conjuring trick by the US government in just the same way that Kennedy’s generals wanted to fool the world over Cuba.

Planes were swapped, ‘drones’ slammed into the World Trade Centre (which was mined with explosives as well) and the Pentagon, and the identities of alleged hijackers from the Middle East were stolen or invented to put the blame on Al Qaeda.

Along with the ‘passengers’ who apparently boarded the planes, the ‘suicide hijackers’ are now either dead or living under different identities, just as the pentagon planned fro the military personnel it was going to use back in 1962.

The theory seizes on the fact that, like the plane that apparently hit the Pentagon, both Flight 11 and Flight 175 switched off their transponders on their way to the Twin Towers and disappeared from Radar screens. According to the skeptics, this gave them time and opportunity to land at the handily located Griffiss Air Force Base, a Pentagon command center which also houses research laboratories into advanced computers and radar. There, they were supposedly replaced by remote-controlled substitutes.

In technical terms, this is not as far fetched as it sounds. The US military experimented with unmanned aircraft as far back as World War II and there have been successful jet models since. Well-connected conspirators, so the theory goes, would have little difficulty getting their hands on a system to fit in an airliner.

The switch would supposedly be foolproof because, as we have seen, the aircraft in the ruins would not be properly identified.

Then there was the smaller building known as WTC7. It was the obvious point from which to run the New York end of the scam, guiding the planes into their target. Afterwards, of course, the evidence had to be destroyed, hence its demolition.

Taken as a rush, and without looking at the detail this might seem vaguely plausible. But could we really have been so totally and utterly conned?

Common sense says no. An operation of such intricacy and complexity would require the co-operation - and the silence until death - of thousands of people. Everything we have read about the victims on the planes, and their heartbroken relatives, would be a carefully constructed sham.

It might just be possible in a totalitarian society but surely not in a flawed yet robust democracy like America. And with four missions (the hijackers of the fourth plane, Flight 93, were overthrown by its passengers), not just one as in OPERATION NORTHWOODS? No.

To be fair to Henshall and Morgan, they make it clear that they themselves are not advocating such an extreme theory of empty planes and hoax attacks.

They admit the Pentagon’s radar reconstructions suggest the planes were not switched, and that alleged Al Qaeda ringleaders are said by their interrogators to have confirmed the official account.

Instead of retreating into fantasy, they simply insist that something is being held back - that we have not been told the full story. And it’s hard to discount all their arguments.

Why, they ask, were air traffic controllers so slow to report suspected hijackings to the military that day in breach of standard procedures, with the result that fighter planes arrived too late to intercept?

Flight controllers in four separate incidents were unaccountably slow to realize that something was wrong and alert the military authorities. Even after one plane was definitely known to have been hijacked, they failed to respond promptly when others went missing.The air force scrambled from the wrong base

For some reason, too, when fighter planes eventually were scrambled to New York, they were from an airbase 150 miles away, rather than the much closer one in New Jersey. The Twin Towers were ablaze before they got there.

All the while the local TV channels were smoothly getting eye-in-the-sky helicopters into the air over the World Trade Centre. In the words of the authors: “Their routine mobilizations stand in stark contrast to the apparent impotence and indecisiveness of the $350-billion-a-year US military.

Yet for all the shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Authority and the US Air Force that day, no-one was ever fired or reprimanded.

One explanation for this paralysis is that there was, as fate would have it, an air defence exercise going on in US airspace that same day, codenamed Vigilant Guardian. The air traffic controllers were confused by this, thinking the planes disappearing from their screens might be part of the exercise.

Coincidence? No say the 9/11 sceptics. This was exactly the sort of smokescreen operation that anyone wanting to make life easier for the hijackers would launch to paralyse any authorities that might get in the way.

When the first evidence came that hijackings were taking place, traffic control officials wasted valuable time wondering whether or not this was part of the Vigilant Guardian exercise.

Suck a smokescreen fits well with two types of government-inspired plot postulated by 9/11 sceptics - popularly known as ‘LIHOP’ and ‘MIHOP’.

‘LIHOP’ - ‘Let It Happen On Purpose’ - holds that since the turn of the new century, radical right-wingers in Washington (the so-called new-cons) had been keen to get a US military presence in the Middle East oilfields and were also desperate to do something about Al Qaeda, which had been targeting US interests overseas.

When evidence came in of an impending terrorist attack, they decided to ignore it. They intended that it should succeed. It would act at the very least as a ‘wake-up’ call to their apathetic fellow countrymen and at best as an excuse for war.

In the much the same way, some historians believe, President Roosevelt knew in advance from broken codes about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 - but let it happen, at the cost of 2,400 lives, because he wanted an excuse to join World War II.

‘MIHOP” takes a step on from this - ‘Make it Happen On Purpose’. This theory has the same motivation but the active involvement of US agents. Planted in Al Qaeda, they helped organize the plot, or at the very least cleared a path for the hijackers.

These agents may even have tried to keep down casualty figures, which some think were suspiciously small in the circumstances.

The plane that hit the Pentagon was seen to swerve at the last minute and hit an area of the building that was largely unoccupied - and which had just been fitted with reinforced external walls and blast-resistant windows. A crash into the other side would have killed and maimed many thousands instead of just 125.

In New York, too, more than 50,000 inhabitants of the Towers were targeted but just 2,600 killed - not least because of the orderly way in which the buildings collapsed, after most of the occupants had been evacuated. Was this an example of a ‘managed’ atrocity?

For most observers, the idea of US involvement in the attacks still strains credulity beyond breaking point. Yet that catalogue of unanswered questions remains troubling.

Some are very basic. How, for example, did the hijackers manage to slip past airport security with weapons?

The White House explanation is plastic knives, but there has never been any independent confirmation of how the men were armed. Some passengers who made phone calls from the doomed planes said they witnessed stabbings but others spoke of bombs and even guns being used.

To some, the official recourse to ‘plastic knives’ smacks of a cover-up to conceal security lapses - or worse, a deliberate turning of blind eyes.

So how did the passengers make those phone calls?

Another problem here is those very phone calls from the planes. Experts in Henshall and Morgan’s book say it is all but impossible to make a mobile phone call above 8,000 feet - let alone four times that altitude, as the jet passengers are alleged to have done.

So how were these calls on which so much of the 9/11 narrative has been built ever made? Could they possibly have been invented?

The authors write: ‘Few issues cause as much controversy amongst 9/11 sceptics as these, not least because they were cited - by Tony Blair among others - as eyewitness reports and proof positive the official narrative was true.’

Doubts are even raised over the gung-ho story of Flight 93, the fourth plane in the attacks, which passengers apparently seized back from the hijackers, causing it to crash into a field but miss Washington.

The legend of the heroic cockpit-storming, launched to cries of ‘Let’s Roll’, was a product of tapes that have never been authenticated or released to anyone other than the victims’ relatives, who were sworn to secrecy.

Henshall and Morgan say the matter could be cleared up if recordings or billing evidence from phone companies were produced but they never have been.

This call for transparency is the thrust of their whole argument. It is time, they say, for a full and truly independent inquiry into 9/11 that will reveal all the facts and silence the rumours.

One thing it could consider would be the anthrax attack on America three weeks after 9/11. Five recipients of contaminated letters died, postal facilities were closed, as were office buildings on Capitol Hill where hundreds of lawmakers and staff were tested and given an antibiotic.

At the time, this was seized on by the Washington power-brokers pressing for action against Iraq. ‘Who but Saddam Hussein could have supplied Arab terrorists with anthrax,’ they asked.

By contrast, skeptics about 9/11 see this as this finishing touch to the grand plot - an attempt to distract attention from any doubts about the atrocities and the lessons to be learned from them.

They may have a case. The letters mysteriously stopped and the anthrax spores were identified by scientists as a particular strain stemming only from the government’s own labs in Maryland.

But by then the scare had shut down congress at a crucial time, when questions about 9/11 were beginning to surface, and helped deepen the mood of fear and paranoia among ordinary Americans.

It was those fears, say the skeptics, that Bush exploited to get his way on Iraq. Had he plotted it that way all along? Henshall and Morgan raise enough awkward points to make it a thought that cannot simply be laughed out of court.

After all, Bush and Blair, took us to war assuring us that ‘the Iraq regime continues to possess some of the most lethal weapons ever devised’. Yet those weapons of mass destruction have not been found and many doubt they existed.

With public trust one of the major casualties of the war, can any of us be absolutely sure we have not been caught up in a lie and perhaps a bigger one even than we ever though possible?

In their inquiries Henshall and Morgan may have discover no smoking guns - but they have certainly left a whiff of something sinister in the air.

Wednesday, 10 August 2005

This madness must end or it will lead to a nightmare the likes of which humanity has never seen. Blair and Bush are hazardous to our health! Do you really want to see nukes going off ANYWHERE in the world? I didn't think so!

by Mike Whitney

“As President Bush scans the world’s horizon there is no greater potential flashpoint than Iran, the President and his Foreign Policy team believe the Islamic regime in Tehran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons.” Chris Wallace, FOX News

The facts about Iran’s “alleged” nuclear weapons program have never been in dispute. There is no such program and no one has ever produced a shred of credible evidence to the contrary. That hasn’t stopped the Bush administration from making spurious accusations and threats; nor has it deterred America’s “imbedded” media from implying that Iran is hiding a nuclear weapons program from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). In fact, the media routinely features the unconfirmed claims of members of terrorist organizations, like the Mujahedin Klaq, (which is on the State Depts. list of terrorist organizations) to make it appear that Iran is secretively developing nuclear arms. These claims have proved to be entirely baseless and should be dismissed as just another part of Washington’s propaganda war.

Sound familiar?

Iran has no nuclear weapons program. This is the conclusion of Mohammed el-Baradei the respected chief of the IAEA. The agency has conducted a thorough and nearly-continuous investigation on all suspected sites for the last two years and has come up with the very same result every time; nothing. If we can’t trust the findings of these comprehensive investigations by nuclear experts than the agency should be shut down and the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty) should be abandoned. It is just that simple.

That, of course, is exactly what the US and Israel would prefer since they have no intention of complying with international standards or treaties and are entirely committed to a military confrontation with Iran. It now looks as though they may have the pretext for carrying out such an attack.

Two days ago, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman formally rejected a plan submitted by the EU members that would have barred Iran from “enrichment-related activities”. Foreign Minister Hamid Reza Asefi said, “The Europeans' submitted proposals regarding the nuclear case are not acceptable for Iran."

Asefi did the right thing; the offer was conspicuously hypocritical. The United States doesn’t allow any intrusive inspections on its nuclear weapons sites even though it is the only nation that has ever used nukes in battle and even though it is developing a whole new regime of tactical “bunker-buster” bombs for destroying heavily-fortified weapons sites buried beneath the ground.

The US is also the only nation that claims the right to use nukes in a “first-strike” capacity if it feels that its national security interests are at stake.

The NPT is entirely designed to harass the countries that have not yet developed nuclear weapons and force them to observe rules designed by the more powerful states. It was intended to maintain the existing power-structure not to keep the peace.

Even so, Iran is not “violating” the treaty by moving ahead with a program for “enriching uranium”. They don’t even have the centrifuges for conducting such a process. The re-opening of their facility at Isfahan signals that they will continue the “conversion” process to produce the nuclear fuel that is required in nuclear power plants. This is all permitted under the terms of the NPT. They temporarily suspended that right, and accepted other confidence-building measures, to show the EU their willingness to find a reasonable solution to mutual concerns. But, now, under pressure from the Bush administration, the EU is trying to renege on its part of the deal and change the terms of the treaty itself.

No way.

So far, Iran has played entirely by the rules and deserves the same considerations as the other signatories of the treaty. The EU members (England, Germany, and France) are simply back-pedaling in a futile effort to mollify Washington and Tel Aviv. Besides, when Iran re-opens its plant and begins work, the UN “watchdog” agency (IAEA) will be present to set up the necessary surveillance cameras and will resume monitoring everything that goes on during the sensitive fuel-cycle process.

Iran has shown an unwillingness to be bullied by Washington. The Bush administration has co-opted the EU to enforce its double-standards by threatening military action, but that doesn’t’ conceal the duplicity of their demands. Why should Iran forgo the processing of nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes if it is written right into the treaty? Would Israel or Pakistan accept a similar proposal?

Of course, not. Both countries ignored the treaty altogether and built their own nuclear weapons behind the back of the international community. Only Iran has been singled out and punished for COMPLYING with the treaty. This demonstrates the power of Washington to dictate the international agenda.

Iran’s refusal puts the EU in a position to refer the case to the IAEA, where the board members will make their determination and decide whether the case should be sent to the UN Security Council. Whether the IAEA passes the case along or not makes little difference. Bush, Sharon and the western media will exploit the details in a way that condemns Iran and paves the way for a preemptive attack. The drive to war will not be derailed by mere facts.

Iran has weathered the media criticism and the specious claims of the Bush administration admirably. They have responded with caution and discipline seeking reasonable solutions to thorny issues. Never the less, they have been unwavering in defending their rights under the NPT. This consistency in behavior suggests that they will be equally unswerving if they are the targets of an unprovoked attack. We should expect that they will respond with full force; ignoring the threats of nuclear retaliation. And, so they should. One only has to look at Iraq to see what happens if one does not defend oneself. Nothing is worth that.

The Iranian people should be confident that their government will do whatever is their power to defend their borders, their national sovereignty and their right to live in peace without the threat of foreign intervention. That, of course, will entail attacking both Israel and US forces in Iraq. Whether or not the US actually takes part in the initial air raids is immaterial; by Mr. Bush’s own standards, the allies of “those who would do us harm” are just as culpable as those who conduct the attacks. In this case, the US has provided the long-range aircraft as well as the “bunker-busting” munitions for the planned assault. The administration’s responsibility is not in doubt.

We should anticipate that the Iranian government has a long-range strategy for “asymmetrical” warfare that will disrupt the flow of oil and challenge American interests around the world. Certainly, if one is facing an implacable enemy that is committed to “regime change” there is no reason to hold back on doing what is necessary to defeat that adversary. So far, none of the terrorist bombings in London, Spain, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or the US have implicated even one Iranian national. That will certainly change. Iranian Intelligence has probably already planned covert operations that will be carried out in the event of an unprovoked attack on their facilities. Iran is also likely to become an active supporter of international terrorist groups; enlisting more recruits in the war against American interests. After all, any attack on Iran can only be construed as a declaration of all-out war.

Monday, 8 August 2005

Ultimately, this is why the bombs went off and all those people died. More moves to turn this country into a police state. And people seem to welcome it with open arms. Westminster and the media whores have them all so scared that I've seen people getting off buses in Brighton when Muslim guys with rucksacks get on. It shows you how ill-informed certain sections of this country are, thanks largely to the efforts of Rupert Murdoch I might add. It's rather frightening when one thinks about it.

Tony Blair served notice yesterday that he was ready to renounce parts of the European convention on human rights if British and European judges continued to block the deportation of Islamic extremists in the wake of the London bombings.

In a significant shift away from the human rights policies championed by Labour since 1997, Mr Blair indicated that he was no longer prepared to allow Britain to be a haven for Muslim extremists whose presence in London has resulted in its being dubbed "Londonistan".

He said he was prepared for "a lot of battles" with the courts, which have repeatedly intervened to prevent the Home Secretary from deporting "preachers of hate" and other foreign nationals regarded as a threat to national security.

"Should legal obstacles arise, we will legislate further, including, if necessary, amending the Human Rights Act in respect of the interpretation of the European convention on human rights," the Prime Minister said.

At a Downing Street press conference before leaving for his summer holiday, he outlined 12 far-reaching curbs on civil liberties to tackle the growth of Islamic extremism.

The sweeping package of anti-terrorist laws included deporting Islamic extremists, closing mosques that fomented hatred, outlawing radical Muslim groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, vetting foreign imams before they came to Britain and stronger powers to deal with home-grown fanatics.

Mr Blair said that because of the London bombings the public wanted new laws to deport and exclude religious fanatics and extremists who were abusing the country's traditional values of tolerance and fair play. The mood was now different and people no longer accused the Government of "scaremongering".

"Let no one be in any doubt," he said, "the rules of the games are changing."

At the heart of the security measures was Mr Blair's determination to regain the right of the elected government to deport foreigners it believed posed a threat to national security.

This was a recognition that the Human Rights Act, introduced by Labour in 1998, had made it virtually impossible to deport foreign militants and enabled the law lords to strike down anti-terrorism laws because they considered them incompatible with the European convention.

Mr Blair's wife, Cherie, a human rights lawyer, has said that the Government should not be provoked into interfering with the independence of the courts. Questioned about her views, the Prime Minister said the right to life and freedom from terrorism was a basic human right.

New grounds for deportation published by the Home Office included fostering hatred, advocating or justifying violence, or active engagement with extremist websites, bookshops and networks.

Mr Blair acknowledged that, since 1996, deportations had been blocked as a result of a European Court ruling that article 3 of the convention on human rights prevented people from being sent back to countries where they could face torture or ill-treatment. He said the circumstances of Britain's national security had changed and the Government was ready to test its new powers in the courts at home and in Europe.

The Government was seeking assurances from the countries where deportees would be returned that they would not be ill-treated. Agreement had been reached with Jordan and discussions were continuing with 10 other countries, including Algeria and Lebanon.

In what will be seen as a plea to British and European judges to reflect the public demand for action, Mr Blair said that France and Spain, both subject to the same human rights convention, were able to deport by administrative decision, with their courts ready to accept assurances that deportees would not be ill-treated on their return.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, welcomed the Government's proposals. He said it was vital that the Home Secretary was able to use his powers to deport or exclude non-British citizens who threatened national security.

Mr Blair ran into opposition from civil rights campaigners and the Liberal Democrats, who said the Government risked inflaming tensions and alienating Muslims.

Eric Metcalfe, of the human rights group Justice, predicted that any attempt to amend the Human Rights Act to force the courts to deport foreigners was "doomed to failure".

The sudden and to my mind suspicious death of a great man. I didn't always agree with him, but at the end of the day Robin Cook had more moral fibre in his left testicle than Phony Bliar has got in his whole body! He resigned from the government out of principle, how many other of those political wretches can say the same thing? If half of Westminster were half the man that Robin Cook was then there would be no need for this website!

Something about this whole thing does not make sense. You'll think "here we go again, Ewar on a paranoia trip" but think about it for a second. Robin Cook was a very healthy person, a regular hill-walker and no-one who knew him has said he had any medical complaints. And yet he drops dead in the highlands doing something he does regularly. His wife said, "he had just suddenly collapsed and stopped breathing ... He had not complained of any pain..." from the newspapers; "Cook was one of the MPs many would have regarded as least likely to have suffered a premature death." and yet everyone just accepts that this was natural causes. Oh no, our government couldn't possibly knock-off a potential opponent, they're much too nice for that! My arse!

Robin Cook was potentially one of Tony's biggest headaches, the only reason he wasn't a headache was because he never actively chose to oppose the government. But what if something made him change his mind? How much of a threat would Robin have been if he'd decided to go up against Phony?

The hillwalking which claimed Robin Cook's life yesterday was a pastime with many allegories to his political career.

He was a loner who wanted space for his own thoughts and saw much of life as a one-man game.

He never joined one of the Labour Party's political tribes, nor sought to start his own. But he was able to make an incredible impact through the sheer force of his intellect, which made him - even on the backbenches - a big political beast.

Even at 59, with a four-year stint at the Foreign Office behind him, he was far from a spent force. He had become Labour's most authoritative and eloquent sceptic in the war on terror. And he was struck down midway through a new political life.

For a man who never sought gangs of friends in the Commons, he had admirers stretching to all political parties. From entering the House as an MP in 1974 - on his 28th birthday - he quickly became known as one of its best orators.

His forensic intelligence and savage debating skills were put to use regularly, allowing him to work his way to the top of Labour's hierarchy. A former CND activist, he had joined the right side of the New Labour movement and was one of its up-and-coming men.

The Commons was the scene of his greatest political moments - specifically his stunning response to the Scott Report into the arms-to-Iraq scandal.

Given only two hours to fillet the document, he delivered a withering attack on John Major's government, seen by all parties as a key moment in its downfall.

His time as Foreign Secretary was not without incident. His attempt to forge an "ethical foreign policy" had mixed success: the government sold Hawk jets to Indonesia and Cook found himself under fire over the 1998 bombing of Iraq.

Although he was furious when asked to stand down as Foreign Secretary in 2001, it was the making of his new career: as Leader of the Commons - an institution he loved. He found a new career on the fringes of government.

Few ministers cherished this post as much as Cook. He loved the Commons; saw it as the cockpit of British democracy and loved debating in it. Few had such a command of the House: he could draw laughs, sighs and even applause on demand.

And he found all three when giving his resignation speech two years ago. Its sharpness lay in the calm. "I had forgotten how much better the view is from here," he said from the backbenches.

The chaps at propagandamatrix.com are to be commended for their dilligent following of this story. It's because of them that a lot of the story has emerged and we owe them a debt of gratitude. Make sure you visit their site and buy one of their t-shirts!

Only conspiracy theorists would believe the government wasn't involved

by Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones

The wealth of evidence that has emerged in the month following the 7/7 London bombings only leads us to one clear conclusion, that the attacks had to have been orchestrated by or with help from the very highest levels of British intelligence.

The latest piece of evidence to suggest that the official story is a fraud focuses again on the contention that the bombs were placed under the trains and were not detonated by suicide bombers wearing backpacks.

The first eyewitness to report this was Bruce Lait, a victim of the Aldgate Station bombing.

"The policeman said 'mind that hole, that's where the bomb was'. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don't remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag."

Now another credible source, Guardian journalist Mark Honigsbaum, talked to eyewitnesses at the Edgware Road bombing, who essentially described the same thing.

Eyewitnesses told Honigsbaum that "tiles, the covers on the floor of the train, suddenly flew up, raised up."

How could the floor of the train raise up from a bomb supposedly in the backpack of an individual seated in the carriage, above the floor?

The victims then heard "an almighty crash" as a train traveling in the opposite direction collided, clearly indicating that the train had derailed due to the bomb being placed under the carriage.

For individuals to plant bombs underneath trains and secure them in place without being caught, they would need to secure access to the trains. In this scenario, London Underground could have been told that a dummy device was to be placed underneath the train as part of an exercise to test security an alertness. When the real attacks happened some LU officials would have been alarmed but their suspicions would have dampened when it was revealed that the bombs were carried in backpacks, meaning that the drill was just a strange 'coincidence'.

The fact that the bombs were actually planted underneath the trains could have easily been buried in an avalanche of official announcements to the contrary.

On the other hand the backpack bombs could have just been the diversionary blasts to enable patsies to be framed, just like the planes flying into the towers acted as the diversionary cover for the explosives planted inside the World Trade Center.

The fact that the ID's of all the so-called suicide bombers were found in pristine condition right next to where the bombs went off strongly suggests the planting of evidence to frame patsies. The ID's would have had a very good chance of surviving if the bomb was not in the backpack with them, but underneath the train.

The drill scenario would have provided culpability cover if investigators started asking questions about objects underneath the carriage.

A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.

On a BBC Radio 5 interview that aired on the evening of the 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company, better known to you and I as a PR firm.

Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch.

Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.

How can anyone credibly claim that this was sheer coincidence when pieced together with the rest of the evidence?

Our original article on this matter is the top link on Google when you type in 'London bombing' - above BBC, CNN and ABC News, proof of how much attention this article received.

Our suspicions were aroused just hours after the bombing when it was reported by Associated Press that Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had received a warning from the Israeli Embassy not to leave his hotel for a speech he was to give that morning. The location of the speech was right next to the site of one of the bombings.

Despite debunking attempts from much of the establishment press, Associated Press never retracted the story and later Mossad admitted that it was true.

The so-called claim of responsibility for the attack was made by a group that is known to not physically exist and which at best is one guy sitting at a computer posting messages on a forum.

And yet the establishment media still report Al-Qaeda responsibility for the attack as if it were the gospel truth.

Exactly what evidence have we seen to even agree with the contention that four men with rucksack bombs carried out this attack? Four grainy CCTV pictures of dark skinned men with rucksacks? Should we not question this evidence especially when verified witnesses on two of the three trains that were bombed said that the bombs were underneath the train and that they saw no men with rucksacks even in the area?

Questions about the attacks are never ending.

Why was it reported that the explosives used were military in origin but then the story changed to say they were homemade? Can explosive experts not tell the difference or was the story changed for a reason?

Why would a man with an 8-month old baby, another who was only interested in sports, and another who taught disabled children, want to kill themselves, other innocent people and cause so much carnage in the process?

Even the establishment media started speculating that the bombers were duped into killing themselves by someone else.

Why did the cameras on the targeted bus malfunction that day? Why was the bus diverted from its usual route? We personally visited the site of the bus bombing at Tavistock Place and verified that no number 30 bus travels down that road.

What are we to make of claims by Stagecoach bus employees who say that a different group of contractors inspected the CCTV cameras in the days before the bombings and that they took two entire days to carry out tasks which normally take just hours to complete.

What is the reason behind Alan Greenspan's decision to flush nearly $40 billion in liquidity into financial markets two days before the attack? Was this an attempt to preemptively head off a run on the markets? If Greenspan had information about a terror attack then why didn't the people on the trains and buses get the same warning?

Who were the individuals that profited from short-selling the British Pound in the ten days before the attack? The pound fell 6% for no particular reason. Fortunes were made after the pound dropped even further in the aftermath of the attacks. This directly mirrors short selling of United and American Airline stocks in the days before 9/11. These suspicious transactions led directly to the CIA.

Why was an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, shot in the head eight times at Stockwell tube station? Why did the police change their story, from saying Menezes was wearing a heavy jacket to admitting it was a lightweight denim jacket? Why did the media initially report that Menezes was shot in the stomach but then change the story when it was pointed out that it would be stupid to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the very place that the bomb would be.

Was Menezes shot because he knew something about the drills? Menezes was an electrician by trade. Did he have damaging knowledge of why the bombings were reported as an electrical surge for over an hour?

Why did Tony Blair immediately reject a public inquiry into how and why the bombings took place? In Britain, there is a public inquiry for every event, no matter how insignificant, and yet after Britain's biggest tragedy since the blitz, Blair shuts the door. What is he frightened of?

The final nail in the coffin regarding inside involvement emerged when it was admitted that the so-called mastermind of both the 7/7 and 7/21 attacks, Haroon Rashid Aswat, is a British Intelligence Asset.

"Back in 1999 he came to America. The Justice Department wanted to indict him in Seattle because him and his buddy were trying to set up a terrorist training school in Oregon... we've just learned that the headquarters of the US Justice Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors not to touch Aswat... , apparently Aswat was working for British intelligence."

The mastermind of the London bombings was under the direction and protection of MI6. How much more obvious does it need to be that criminal elements of the intelligence agencies were involved in this attack?

Saturday, 6 August 2005

How does it feel to be lied to, manipulated and generally treated like you're the dot above the "i" in the word "shit"? The bombs have given our Dear Leader the license to do whatever he wants. He and his friends, George and Arik, now continue their rampage across the civil liberties and lives of thousands. They inhabit the earth like a cancerous growth, out of control and destroying the very environment in which they exist. Working at the behest of their capitalist paymasters they know no remorse or guilt, nor do they grieve for the thousands that die in their meaningless wars. They just do what they're told, they hold us in contempt so why would they not easily sacrifice our lives in the name of power? They hold up their flags and banners as symbols for us to follow but I say that those banners are written in blood and any who follow them follow the way of blood and death, and ultimate disgrace. To be with them is to be on the side of darkness, to follow them is to damn yourself. Mark my words, this darkness must be stopped or humanity's days are numbered. If we allow it to cloak the world in night then nothing in our history will have prepared us for the consequences of the living hell which we will surely all inhabit thereafter. It may seem like you are one voice of sanity in a symphony of idiocy but you're wrong. The only idiocy is that which forms the systems of control in this world, they are drunk on their power and have lost the capacity for reason. They see only their goal and care not how it is achieved, the cost in human souls is irrelevant, they must prevail. But in the greater scheme of things they won't because even the smallest match can illuminate the darkest room. You are that match.

by Jerry Mazza

Now that the British police and intelligence are having second doubts about the four bombers being suicide bombers, the notion has surfaced that maybe they were duped into dying. The question is who are the dupers?

After all, each of the four young men who died (or vanished) on July 7 had purchased round trip railway tickets from Luton to London. I guess you wouldn't do that if you weren't planning to come back. Germaine Lindsay's rented car was left in Luton with a seven-day parking sticker on the dashboard. Also, a large quantity of explosive was left in the trunk of that car, maybe for a second round of bombings.

One of the other alleged bombers also had his car fixed, probably to insure a getaway. What's more, all the men carried driver's licenses and other ID cards with them to their deaths, unusual for suicide bombers, unless you were Mohammed Atta, and your ID somehow managed to pop up clean and clear as day in the wreckage of 9/11. That is, after the plane you flew into the tower exploded in flames and came down in a heap with the building. But that could be someone else's way of saying, hint, hint, it was him, he did it, which might indicate someone was trying to dupe us. Who could that have been?

Well let's think. Maybe the London guys carrying the bombs onto the trains were 'mules," who planned to just leave them to make a few bucks. Maybe they were angry young men making a political statement, maybe both. Their handler might have promised it was an in and out job and they could get out before the blast. The blasts might have surprised them as much as the horrified onlookers and victims. Bottom line, dead men tell no tales, which perhaps they never considered. But 57 minutes later, the fourth bomber, who I guess never bothered to check on his first three cohorts, went up in smoke the same way. Witnesses, it is said, actually saw him put his hand in the backpack—to ignite the bomb or look for his shades and split? We'll never know.

Then we have the July 21 bombers, exactly two weeks later, for whom practice obviously didn't make perfect. The bombs failed to explode. The bomber on the bus took off as the detonator fizzled. Did he and the others instantly assume they might be on their way to heaven? If so, maybe they weren't ready to meet the virgins waiting there. Maybe they were lightweights. And calling them suicide bombers, calling on the full flagon of fear from the English and Europe, was bloody unnecessary, and not a signal for a new level of threat. After all, it is easier to recruit "mules" than die-hard patsies, a la the 9/11 guys (if indeed they were) or Lee Harvey Oswalds (one or two of them), the genuine article(s) or even Jack Rubys, dying of cancer in jail, lips sealed in Omerta. So what are we dealing with here, and whom? In addition, the explosives went from being high level military material to home-brewed boom for the blooming home boys.

Supposedly there's some lively debate going on about the level of commitment and fear ratings in intelligence circles. Or maybe the intelligence agencies, MI-5, MI-6 or CIA, are purposely going round in circles to obfuscate. Because we all know, or should, this is an inside job, a booster shot for Tony Bliar's, excuse me, Tony Blair's War on Terror. Some people even think that saying, as the New York Times did, "that the initial hypothesis that the July 7 attacks were carried out by determined fanatics willing to die in the name of a radical interpretation of Islam may have been too simplistic." Well, it's good to see the investigative principal of questioning government press releases is still alive in the uptown press.

The Times went on to say that maybe these weren't "dedicated but stupid guys run by a smart group of people pulling the strings." Now there's a memorable line, a kind of one-size fits all terrorists' line. And maybe even Hanni Hanjor (the purported idiot, according to his flying instructor) who supposedly flew Flight 77, didn't know he was going down with the plane, if he and his buddies were on the four flights at all. They weren't listed on the manifests, nor did anyone actually prove they were on the planes.

But subsequently the so-called 19, 9/11 terrorists, their names and pictures were produced only 19 hours after the tragedies out of a hat by the same dysfunctional FBI that couldn't stop them in the first place. Is there a pattern here of disinformation along with dysfunction? And may it all be for the purpose of obfuscation, part of a process Webster Tarpley calls 'synthetic terror' in his new book, 911 Synthetic Terror- Made in USA, and in the London case, made in Great Britain.

Friday, 5 August 2005

Whenever something dramatic happens in a country - whether it be an assassination of an important figure, an unexpected war with another nation, or a devastating attack on some treasured symbol - the public expects not only the perpetrators to be punished but also an official explanation of why it happened. It is all very necessary for the public to maintain trust in the officials it has chosen to lead it, and in the very government it has given its allegiance to, and supports with its taxes.

When the Japanese attack on Hawaii on December 7, 1941, for example, occurred, the American people did not expect FDR's government to claim that it was all some terrible mistake which could be resolved by negotiations, or something not worth fighting for. The public anticipated a no-nonsense reply from Washington, and the President did not disappoint it, calling upon a joint session of Congress to declare war on Japan because of its infamy, and appointing Secretary of State Frank Knox to investigate the causes of the terrible tragedy rather than just dismiss it as a ludicrous diversion.

While the Japanese militarists thought that America would throw in the towel when its jewel, the Pacific Fleet, was struck a "mortal blow" while at anchor in Pearl Harbor, Washington behaved in just the manner Japanese fleet commander, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, predicted - waking from its slumbers, and initiating a war of revenge no matter what while punishing the commanders on the scene, Vice Admiral Husband Kimmel, and General Walter Short, for their alleged dereliction of duty in allowing it to happen. Roosevelt's government had not taken seriously the possibility of the Japanese, a nation of "little yellow men", starting a war with Washington, but now there would be Hell to pay for their foolishness.

Still, Washingon had time and interest in investigations into the tragedy. While the Knox one was followed by another finely-balanced military one during the war, headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, and another one right after its end, headed by FDR loyalist and Vice President Alben Barkley, they all come up with the expected whitewash which exonerated the policy-makers in the nation's capital, and tarnished the reputations of the commanders on the scene. Roberts was the judge who changed sides on the constitutionality of FDR's New Deal legislation, especially social security and the National Labor Relations Board, preventing the President from having to pack the Supreme Court with judges of a more liberal stripe.

Kimmel and Short were repeatedly held accountable for the disaster though they had never been clearly informed about its possibility, and their responsibility in preventing it, especially steps which might have minimized its impact. About the intelligence failure, Christopher Andrew wrote in For the President's Eyes Only: "Not a single Japanese decrypt available in Washington pointed to an attack on Pearl Harbor." (p. 120) It took nearly another half-century for the officers to receive some kind of rehabilitation, though they were never granted the court-martials they demanded in order to clear their names.

When President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and Jack Ruby conveniently silenced his alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, there was no talk of just moving on since the whole matter had now been resolved. Actually, there were already too many investigations under way with Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade initiating a murder prosecution of the sleazy night club operator, and Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr opening an inquiry, headed by later Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, into the failure of law-enforcement agencies, especially Hoover's FBI, in preventing it. LBJ appointed the now infamous Warren Commission to clear up the mess - what threatened an international confrontation because of alleged complicity of Moscow and Havana in the murder.

While we all know now that its investigation was a complete fiasco - another whitewash of what had happened - because of the even greater risk of the public learning the truth, the Commission went through the motions of establishing LHO's guilt, while ruling out of hand any other explanations of the assassination for fear that it would lead to the conspiracy in the heart of America's secret government which had assassinated the President. The Commission had to tailor all the evidence to fit the premise the Oswald alone had done it, and, of course, this led to many distortions and omissions which subsequent inquiries, especially the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, have been unable to deal with.

Even when British WMD expert Dr. David Kelly was killed in July 2002, apparently by his own hand, Prime Minister Tony Blair could not treat it merely as a personal matter which could be best resolved by a coroner's inquest, given what the public already knew. It was Kelly's insights into Iraq's WMD - what had become the centerpiece of books that Judith Miller and Thomas Mangold had written on the subject - which had become the hooks that Washington and London had hung their pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein on. Kelly was certain when they wrote their books that the Iraqi dictator had the missiles and the biological agents, particularly anthrax, to hit Israel within 45 minutes of the opening of any hostilities against his regime.

Thanks to UN Resolution 1441 which forced Iraq to make an accounting of what had happened to its WMD, and to allow its weapons inspectors back into the country to search for any secret stores, Washington and London learned that Iraq no longer had the capability that Kelly was so sure of. Consequently, they had to fix the evidence to justify Saddam's ouster (aka the Downing Street Memo), and fight the war under the pretext that Saddam would launch an WMD attack against Israel. The only trouble with the strategy was that Kelly soon learned of his errors, and started talking to BBC reporters, especially Andrew Gillian, about how he had been fooled.

As soon as the MOD, MI6, and Downing Street learned of Kelly's liberties, thanks to feedback from Judy Miller about his future plans on the matter - they outed him to the public in the hope of at least discrediting him, if not destroying him. Miller was deeply involved in covering up the fixing of intelligence to justify the war, contending in her NYT's columns that Saddam haddestroyed some of his WMD right before the war, shipped the rest to Syria, and had joined Al-Qaeda.

Once the Mossad fourn-man kidon helping MI5 fight Britain's terrorisim, it seems, learned of Kelly's outing, it mounted a boat mission on The Thames near Harrowdown Hill to assassinate Kelly - what was made to look like a suicide while he was taking a walk. The plan was to bushwack him, once he was alone in a secluded area, and stuff him with enough of his wife's pain-killers to render him unconscious, leaving him then to die an apparent natural death.

The only trouble with the plot was that Kelly, most suspicious of threats against him, was not surprised by the kidon. He broke away from it when confronted, and ran through a most wooded area, causing significant bruising and leisons to his legs. When he was finally caught, he still put up a struggle, causing bruises to his chest, scratches on his head, and a welt on his lower lip while the kidon was trying to stuff the pain-killer down his throat - which he continually vomitted back up.

In desperation, and in the dark, the squad finally held the left arm down long enough under a torch to open up the less important artery in his wrist. By this time, Kelly was barely conscious. He was then moved from the scene to where the body was found - and there was no evidence of a struggle - and left to die, after being stuffed with more pain-killer which he still managed to vomit back up.

Of course, the Prime Minister could not allow any coroner's inquest in the case - as it was most likely to come up with a verdict of foul play, or at least an open one - so he had the Lord Chancellor appoint a judicial inquiry, under Lord Hutton, into the death. Hutton was the British equivalent of Justice Roberts - FDR's judge who was just itching for a fight with the Japs when the attacks on Hawaii occurred. Hutton, as Northern Ireland's Attorney General, had made a similar career for himself by bringing its war on terror into line with what policy makers in Whitehall wanted through the establishment of Diplock courts - jury-less trials in which convictions were largely based upon the testimony of informer witnesses and coerced confessions.

Hutton delegated his primary responsibility - determining the cause of Kelly's death - to Professor Keith Hawton, the noted expert on suicide. Hawton had prescribed in writing that 30 tablets of a similar pain-killer would be sufficient to kill a person - advice the kidon had followed to a tee when it stole them from Mrs.Kelly's supply, and stuffed them down Kelly's gullet. In sum, the inquiry's verdict was a foregone conclusion.

It was completely out of character when the 7/7 bombings occurred in London that the Prime Minister dismissed calls for special inquiries into them as a "ludicrous diversion" unless officialdom cannot be helped by any biased investigation of them - what seems to be the case. With the four suicide bombers having pulled off a perfect conspiracy while dying in the process (For more on this, see my articles about Lord Stevens and the actual conspiracy in my archive.), there is little that can be gained by having even a most biased inquiry as there are no easy scapegoats to blame, as what happens with more traditional surprises.

Actually, any investigation would just air all kinds of evidence of official incompetence andmalfeasance in the matter. Ever since MI5 was given primary responsibility in stopping terrorism in October 1992, it has increasingly been expanding its relationships with other agencies, particularly Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Unit aka SO13, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and Israel's Mossad, in the hope of taking their measure, particularly the Provisional IRA and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network. The Security Service - being primarily interested in catching the masterminds of terrorism rather than just its foot soldiers - became increasingly involved in developing double agents within various suspected groups in the hope of achieving results which would satisfy all its associates.

Of course, Britain has long been a sanctuary for terrorists, emigrants, and asylum seekers. During the 19th and 20th centuries, many freedom-fighters - especially of nations under the yoke of the Austrian, Russian, and German empires in Eastern Europe, most notably Hungary's Louis Kossuth and Italy's Guiseppe Mazzini - sought refuge in London. While this process slowly wound down with the collapse of the Cold War and the formation of the European Union, people in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia increasingly joined the ranks of those seeking refuge in Britain, thanks to the collapse of its own empire, Israel's wars of expansion, and Western efforts to control the flow of oil - a process which diluted Britain's social cohesion.

All the politically-involved emigrant groups - except for Irish Republicans, though even they were giving up their strategy of an armed struggle to gain independence of Northern Ireland from Britain - were committed to the so-called "covenant of security" which meant that they would never attack their fellow Britons, though there was little cause for them to do so. Consequently, Muslim groups became ideal recruits for special operations Britain had planned with America and Israel. MI5's T Branch, responsible for combatting domestic terrorism, saw this as an good way of keeping up with G Branch, whose mandate was international terrorism, when it came to funds, personnel, and missions, especially now that PIRA terrorism was drying up.

Little wonder that when Washington was looking for freedom-fighters and moles in the fight against Greater Serbia in Bosnia-Hertzegovina, shoring up Kosovo and Albania, and defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, MI6 was most eager to oblige, and T Branch did what it could to help out. The center of Britain's recruitment efforts was the Finsbury mosque where the fiery Abu Qatada aka Captain Hook and Omar Uthman Abu Omar held forth on the need of jihadists to combat Western evils, and his assistant Haroon Rashid Awat signed up anyone willing to go. Huge sums were desposited in London banks and elsewhere to help fund the covert activities of his Al-Muhajiroun ('The Emigrants' in arabic) in laying the groundwork for rolling back Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (Operation Gateway).

All this planning and good work went down the drain, though, when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Instead of Al-Qaeda's hijackers being harmlessly exposed to the world as the CIA and NORAD shut down the hijacked planes without loss - what would constitute an act of war, justifying the end of the Taliban for harboring such terrorists - the hijackers turned out to be suicide bombers, making all-out war with Osama and his supporters inevitable and immediate. Those who were not killed outright in the lightening strike on Afghanistan were killed by the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, in its aftermath. Those who were not killed were then imprisoned indefinitely wherever they could and forced to tell all they knew about the others. Al-Qaeda was like a plague, or a rogue state which had to be eradicated completely.

At first, this meant massive roundups in individual countries, and renditions of more likely middleman to countries like Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan for the full treatment when it came to interrogation. The Coalition, as T Branch had done in Northern Ireland, was looking for supergrasses, coerced informants, who would tell all about the movement. "Christopher Black, the first IRA supergrass," Caroline Kennedy-Pipe wrote in The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland, "implicated thirty-eight people in his testimony." (p. 144) With Saddam Hussein's regime already marked out for destruction, it was just a question of time before Osama and his supporters would follow.

When these assumptions started proving unlikely if not impossible despite the roundups and renditions of likely suspects, the Coalition started outing its supergrasses, and implicating their associates in all kinds of terrorism. Abu Omar, the Intelligence and Democratic Security Service's (SISD) supergrass in Italy, became such an attractive source that the CIA kidnapped him in February 2003, and rendered him to Egypt for interrogation because the Agency did not think that SISD was getting everything out of him it could. Anzar's Higher Defense Intelligence Center ((CESID) in Spain locked up Syrian-born Edin Barakat Yarkas aka Abu Dahdah indefinitely on suspicion of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. And in December 2001 Abu Qatada disappeared from his house in Acton, apparently having become a supergrass for the British security services.

In Britain, Abu Qatada's supergrass efforts turned out worse than those of Black and the Irish National Liberation Army's Henry Kirkpatrick back in Ulster in the 1980s. While convictions, based upon their informer testimony, were increasingly thrown out by the courts, Qatada's efforts resulted in little more than the sending to jail the "Portland Seven" - guys who had been led to Afghanistan by his assistant Aswat after their effort to establish a terrorist training ground in Bly, Oregon had failed. After that, Aswat himself went underground. Then Qatada's testimony that asylum-seeker and psychopath Kamel Bourgoss was establishing a ricin ring in Manchester, despite the roundup of 200 suspect associates, only resulted in the murder of Special Branch detective Stephen Oake when they failed to restrain him after making an arrest.

Still, Qatada was so effective in persuading T Branch that he knew all about what the terrorists at his mosque were planning that it agreed to conduct Operation Crevis in November 2003 to catch them. (For more on this, see my articles about Lord Stevens and the 7/7 bombings in the Trowbridge Archive.) Suicide bombers Asif Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, member of Qatada's mosque, has just blown up Mike's Bar outside Tel Aviv, and security officials believed that similar terrorists would flock to his calls. MI5, with the help of Canadian counterterrorists, supplied the mastermind and bomb expert Mohammad Monim Khawaja to the false flag operation, and Qatada himself was expected to supply the necessary recruits through his cellphone calls, and what they generated among Britain's increasingly disaffected Muslims.

Well, Operation Crevis was completely upstaged by what Abu Dahdah's followers pulled off in Madrid on 3/11 - what was such a devastating blow to Aznar's government that it not only lost at the polls three days later, but also destroyed all the government's deliberations leading up to and after the attacks, as Socialist Prime Minister José Rodrigues Zapatero recently testified before the parliamentary commission investigating the tragedy. The evidence would show that GCHQ, Britain's signal intelligence system, was so intrigued by the "chatter" that Operation Crevis was creating that it persuaded Spanish counterterrorists that the real threat was in Britain, and that Madrid would only have to worry about a demonstration bombing by ETA, the Basque separatist group - what Aznar persisted in claiming his own counterterrorist people maintained.

MI5 did what it could to cover up the scandal by having its agent 'Gould' flush the young Muslim pasties in Crawley and West London to Pakistan, but they refused to flee. While Scotland Yard, thanks to continuing scare-mongering by its Chief Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, went through the motions of taking 'the plot' seriously, claiming that it had prevented a serious terrorist attack, the whole thing was simply dropped.

As in Northern Ireland, Operation Crevis's use of supergrasses had most unexpected consequences, especially since the wars in Iraq and on terror were simlpy getting worse. While security officials were giving the widest berth possible to all those connected in the slightest way to it, some of them, especially Mohammad Kayoun Khan, became increasingly radicalized by what they had been through, and were now experiencing. He even went to Pakistan and Israel to see what it was all about - what opened his eyes to what the West was really engaged in with its secret operations and lies. He had little trouble recruiting three like-minded Muslims to become martyrs - like what Northern Ireland's hunger strikers within the Maze Prison became, and what Prime Minister Thatcher had approved the use of supergrasses to stop.

While I have little to add to what I have already written about this conspiracy, one should note that the Security Service and Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist-Unit turned a completely blind eye on the whole process - vetting Khan apparently and deciding that he was not a threat. Thanks to Lord Stevens again, the security services were absolutely obsessed with the idea that only a "white convert" - reminiscent of what Washington thought about the Japanese before Pearl Harbor - could supply the needed planning, and bomb-making expertise for a coordinated urban attack. Actually, the bombs were made from readily-available peroxide compounds which anyone reading the internet could put together, and set to explode by synchronized mobile phones, provided they were kept cool until shortly before detonation.

This misconception by the British counterterrorists resulted in the reimprisonment of Shankill Road bomber Sean Kelly back in Northern Ireland in October 1993 four weeks before the July attacks in London in the expectation that this prevented all possibilities of a repeat of what happened in Madrid. In fact, the security services were so confident that they had everything under control that they reduced the threat level from "severe" to "substantial" after Kelly re-entered prison.

When the 7/7 attacks still occurred, the Blair government could not simply do what Aznar's did after 3/11. Instead of scrubbing the record clean - what was bound to leak out, and would certainly end in Blair's political humiliation and ouster - it had to create a new legend which would cover up the first attacks while apparently reassuring the public that everything was essentially okay. Its answer was a replay two weeks later, perhaps put together by "Gould" in order to make amends, in which a "copy-cat" operation had all the desired effects without any casualties. The mission was planned so that the coordinatesd bombs did not explode either because the explosive had become inert or was simply flour.

Then the Brits went hog-wild with their new Security Regiment, built from remnants of the 14 Intelligence Company from Northern Ireland, while one of the pseuo-bombers, Hussain Osman aka Hamdi Isaac, was allowed to escape to Italy. The special team following Jean Charles de Menezes had complete discretion in how to handle his surveillance, and when it became confused, as it had in at least seven or eight other occasions, it shot him dead - not to cover up anything but to establish that the counterterrorists had finally accomplished something. Osman, in Italy, was allowed to sing to the press about the operation not wanting to kill anyone - what so reassured the British public about the possibilities of future 7/7s that Scotland Yard was obliged to deny his claims.

MI5 had even tried to bring Aswat into the picture by having him come to Britain, and call one of the pseudo-bombers the night before the attacks before departing, hoping that this would fit him out as the mastermind of both attacks. Unfortunately, the South African Secret Service had spotted him there on 7/7, and counterterrorist expert John Loftus disclosed to Fox News that Aswat had been an MI6 asset for years.

As this is all slowly played out by Scotland Yard, and in the courts, the public will soon lose interest, and the Prime Minister can rest assured that Aznar's fate does not await him.

Enlightenment

Do you feel like you're living in some Orwellian nightmare? Or perhaps you feel as if you're plugged into The Matrix? Well if so, you've come to the right place. No matter how messed up you thought the world was, by the time you've finished reading some of the things I've found on my travels in Cyberspace you'll realise that 1984 was just a typo!

A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk when they are off their heads. To understand what codshit is watch the film Human Traffic.

Comments are welcome, but before you waste perfectly useful energy abusing me please take a moment to reflect on the basic right we all have to express ourselves!

Please remember that I am not telling you what to think or believe, take everything you read here with a large grain of salt!

Wisdom

If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent... usually... It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.

So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.

Let there be no doubt that the people of the free world are engaged in a war... In the next few years, we are either going to see the people of the free world rise up against these fascists, now setting the stage for global war, or we are going to see the end of democracy as we know it with martial law the end result.
.: David Shayler :.

Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
.: Albert Einstein :.